Guillermo del Toro’s least favourite kind of movie: “I hate all that stuff”
Guillermo del Toro and horror go together like a severed hand in a bloody glove, especially since the Mexican maestro has always had a fascination with the macabre, going right back to his early days behind the camera, and even when he’s not making straight-up horror movies, he finds ways to incorporate the spooky into his storytelling, but that being said, it’s not like he’s a one-trick pony.
His wonderfully eclectic filmography is a selection box of genres and styles, having made Crimson Peak, a gothic romance, right after he came out with Pacific Rim, an action flick about giant robots fighting monsters, and he’s strayed into the superhero/comic book realm a few times with Blade II and Hellboy, and then there’s all the stuff he’s produced or written for, but dd you know he was an executive producer on DreamWorks’ Puss in Boots? He really can do it all. Just don’t ask him to do anything with AI.
He might have very broad cinematic tastes, but even del Toro is averse to some things. In an interview with Digital Spy, he spoke about one particularly genre that he was never able to get on board with, despite it being one of the most popular in all of fiction.
“I was never into heroic fantasy,” he admitted. “At all. I don’t like little guys and dragons, hairy feet, hobbits – I’ve never been into that at all. I don’t like sword and sorcery, I hate all that stuff.”
Long-term fans of both del Toro and fantasy might be surprised to hear this. The Oscar winner was announced as the director of a series of films based on JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit all the way back in 2008, but ultimately, this deal fell through, and Peter Jackson took over, but he was still credited as a co-writer on all three of the movies, and as fantasy goes, it doesn’t get much bigger than the story that began the world’s love affair with Middle Earth. How would he have reconciled his hatred for “hobbits” when he was literally making a movie about them?
On a broader note, fans might be confused as to why del Toro is so against fantasy. So many of his greatest movies contain elements of the genre. The creature at the centre of The Shape of Water, the depiction of Death in his version of Pinocchio, and all of Pan’s Labyrinth.
The list goes on. None of that fits the ‘sword and sorcery’ mantra, however. He blends fantasy and reality, cherry-picking the bits that he likes and leaving behind the “hairy feet” he despises. Del Toro’s entire philosophy revolves around subversion. Genuine fantasy is probably too sincere for his cynical brain.
Weirdly, del Toro’s version of Frankenstein might be the gateway drug to him accepting fantasy into his life, because that adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novel was painfully accurate, often to its own detriment.
And if del Toro can bring himself to make a sincere movie based on a book about a mad scientist, then why can’t he do the same with one about dragons and knights?
